Blogtastic June 7, 2009

I wonder how many blog entries world-wide have the title “blogtastic” or “blogging about blogs” or something similar.

I’ve been blogging properly for about 3 weeks now. Why did I start? 3 main reasons.

I forget stuff {I’m getting to that age} so I thought a blog was as good a place as any to stick stuff where I could find it.

I like to teach. I know, it sounds a bit naff, but I honestly like explaining things and teching people stuff. If I was starting out on my career again, I would do more training.

Narcisism. There has to be an element of wanting to be noticed in anyone who blogs! I’d like to be a “C” list Oracle Name 🙂

After a few weeks blogging, what have I learned?

I really like it when I get comments. It is less like talking to an empty room.

I am talking to an empty room! When I linked back to my blog from Jonathan Lewis’s blog my hits jumped from a half dozen to 80. They are heading back to a half dozen now.

Google does not pick up stuff just because it is on a blog. Which is maybe good as think how many spurious hits you would get for 99% of stuff and it is bad as, not only are people missing out on the great stuff I say, more worryinlgy, when I ask Google about some aspect of Oracle I know nothing about, how much great stuff am I missing?

It takes a lot of time to do rigorous explanations of oracle facts, which is what I have always demanded from my Oracle sources (and is why I use “-burleson” in my google searches).

I know my blogs are too long, I’ve been told. But then, they are supposed to be for my own benefit and I like to see why I decided what I think I know.

It takes a loooong time to say what you want to say. I’ve put a few basic techie things up and have not touched on my 2 other areas, VLDB and management. It is going to take me a long time to put down things I want to put down. I have a list of , ohhh, maybe 50 things to blog about already.

And last for now? It’s addictive. I want to put down everything now.I want people to find and read my blog now. I want my stats to be high.Why? Narcisism of course 🙂 But also because if I’m going to teach people there has to be people listening.

And really for last. Why do I want to teach? Well, the post on Consistent Gets says it all. When you teach people, you learn. The hardest questions often come from people who know the least about a topic.

I do use categories and tags, plus I put ping backs to earlier posts on the same topic, but I’ll think if I can make navigation easier. My blogs are very verbose. I was going to put a category on the side bar for “best bits” but I did not feel I could do that after only 3 weeks!